For months I have asked for help in making VCD's and have had lots of good answers OFF line from this site and many on this site that think I am off the planet. A couple of questions have remained un answered.

1) why can I not play more than 2 tracks from a videoCD?

2) why does the dvd player stop playing part way into a vcd track?

3) why does adapect 3.5 put the *.dat files in the wrong folder?

I have learnt to put up with these restrictions and have been using only WinonCD 3.5 to burn my vcd's as at least that made two tracks usable but any others could not be played by computer or by the dvd player.

Well, on the weekend I loaded Nero 4.0.7 and loaded up some mpeg1 files previously used for vcd's (from my archives) and was stunned that Nero when checking the files indicated all were non compliant with the white book specification. All have been encoded from avi's resized and rendered in Premier 5.1 using the LSX 2.51, 3.0 or Panasonic encoders which have not objected to any of my source files.

The error message said all my files did not comply with the requirement for the sound being 44/16 stereo - it read my files as 44/16 "2 channel" this despite "stereo" being set for all phases of the process to the final vcd burn.

Seems I must now look into my sound card recording system! Maybe someone can explain what is the difference between "2 channel" and "stereo" sound in the white book spec as a lot of audio CD's that claim to be stereo are in fact 2 track mono.

Nero then allowed me to burn a non-compliant file using "2 Channel" sound and wow I burnt 7 tracks onto a VCD and all tracks were playable on the computer AND on my Phillips dvd 725 player. Praise be to .....

So it seems to me that the adaptec program must sense the problem and then place the files in the wrong folder because they are non compliant. Pity adaptec programmers did not have the sense to program an error message so that all out there that have had these problems would at least know why - BRAVO NERO !!!!!!!!

All I need now is for Nero to provide interactive vcd burn facilities.

This site is not very good at saying thanks for anything so I will say it for all who have the problem, try NERO - Thanks Ross!

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), November 07, 1999

Answers

Hi Ross! The difference between "Stereo" and "2 channels" is that with STEREO the bitrate may differ between the 2 sides, while in 2 CHANNELS this is not possible. Example: You choose 224 bits/sec for the audio at the .mpeg profiles; then "2 CHANNELS" means that you are choosing a fixed rate of 112 bps per channel. Stereo is better because it allows more bits to be allocated in the channel with most demands at a time (more complex sound) and this varies and rebalances all along one track.

Another important point is the block size attribute of a .mpeg. I have found no program capable of reading this in the net, so I'm actually working on my own one. The ideal block size for a VCD should be 2324 instead of the more common 2048.

Lastly, I know nothing about Nero, but Adaptec's 3.0d does a great job and *doesn't* put the .dats in the wrong folder. As you said on another answer, there's no need to upgrade just because of the upgrade itself! Bye!

-- Matias (petrellm@telefonica.com.ar), November 09, 1999.